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Paul Smithson - 12th March 2009There are so many different payment systems
available, it may be difficult to decide which one is right for
your site.

Payment processors vary in the fees they
charge, their terms of service, the products they’re happy for
merchants to sell, and which countries they are happy to accept
merchants from, so making a decision isn’t always as easy as
you might at first think.

PayPal is the most widely-known payment
processor on the Internet. They’ve been around for many
years, and have been used by millions of people to process
payments for all types of online
transactions.

They have a built-in recurring transaction
model, which is great for subscription sites. They offer
a MasterCard debit card that can be used to withdraw money
directly from your PayPal account via an ATM, or to spend money
at any place that accepts MasterCard. They have a good
reputation amongst buyers and the service is relatively easy to
use for both customers and the merchant
themselves.

There are a few major drawbacks to
PayPal. For one thing, they don’t accept merchants
from certain countries so if you are in one of those countries
then you can cross PayPal of your list. They also require
a credit card and a bank account to be linked to them, so if
you don’t have those, you can’t get a PayPal
account.

They’re also relatively strict about what
you’re allowed to sell. For example, they don’t allow any
kind of MLM schemes or multi-tiered payment schemes, so if you
want to have a two-tier affiliate program then PayPal will not
be the solution for you.

Google Checkout is a relative newcomer to
the payment processing arena. They’ve set themselves up
to compete head-on with PayPal. eBay, who owns PayPal, has gone
so far as to prohibit eBay sellers from accepting Google
Checkout as a form of payment for auctions on their
site.

Maybe this is one sign that eBay and PayPal
believe Google Checkout could pose a real threat to them in the
future. Google Checkout certainly has some competitive benefits
that will give PayPal a run for its money and I am sure
conventional credit card payment processors must be watching
what happens with a high level of
concern.

One of the big benefits of Checkout is that
it offers free processing for AdWords advertisers based on
their ad spend. For every dollar you spend on AdWords you
qualify for free processing on sales up to ten times that
amount. This means if you spend $1,000 per month on AdWords,
you can process $10,000 in sales without any processing
fees.

If you go above ten times your AdWords
expenditure, the fees are only 2 % + $0.20 per transaction,
which compares very favorably with PayPal’s fees, which are
1.9% to 2.9% + $0.30 per
transaction.

If you’d prefer to go down route of having
your own merchant account rather than using a service such as
PayPal or Google Checkout then a lot of options are open to
you.

Having your own merchant account can be a
major benefit if your level of sales justify it, but getting a
full-blown merchant account is usually considerably more
difficult that opening an account with PayPal or
Google.

In addition to making you jump through a
lot of hoops in terms of paperwork, conventional merchant
accounts will often have a considerable number of rules that
you must abide by, and will often ask you a lot of in-depth
questions about the products you are going to be selling, what
kind of guarantees you offer, what your refund policy is,
etc.

One of the major benefits of having your
own merchant account is that it is often far easier to
integrate them directly into your sales process than either
PayPal or Google. Most top-end merchant accounts come with
powerful APIs that allow your programmers to tightly integrate
all aspects of the payment process into the sales process so
that it appears completely seamless to the end
user.

A major downside to some of the merchant
account providers is that they can behave in an incredibly
arrogant way on some occasions. It’s far from unknown for
people to have their credit card processing facility cut off
with no prior notice for minor issues, or simply because they
think you have turned over too much in a short period of time,
which is obviously a problem for Internet marketers who are in
the process of a major launch. PayPal have historically tended
to be far more accommodating with this kind of thing, although
they’ve been known to do exactly the same thing from time to
time, just not quite as frequently.

No matter which route you choose to go down
you need to be very clear of what you require from your payment
processor. You also need to make sure you do your due diligence
as far as issues such as exceeding turnover levels are
concerned.

Time spent finding the right payment
provider is time well spent, as moving from one payment system
to another, once your business is up and running, is often a
complex process, particularly if you have an affiliate scheme
tied in to it.

On the plus side, it’s far easier to get
payment processing facilities now than it has ever been, and
with the likes of Google joining the fray the extra competition
should help to see a continuing downward trend in the rates
being charged and an upward trend in the level of service being
offered.

About Paul Smithson -
Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving
force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development
tool. Since graduating in Business Strategy and Direct
Marketing from two of Europe’s leading business schools, Paul
has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is
now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business
strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software
development, and maximizing the potential of on-line
businesses.

For more information about
this, and many other Internet Marketing-related
topics, visit Paul Smithson's site,
www.xsitepro.com.